How much should I personally invest in my startup?

Brayton Williams / November, 2017

Description

Brayton Williams, Co-Founder and Partner at Boost VC explains why the right amount of effort and investment into your startup is important.

Video Transcript

Super difficult question. People come from all backgrounds, people come from very different money situations. I’d say the big thing is that as an investor you want the entrepreneur to be putting in everything that they have to it. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything you have. I do believe that if you have a family, don’t put your family on the street. If you need a little bit of fall back maybe, but at the end of the day if I’m looking for an entrepreneur, he’s putting everything on there and there is no fallback, that really speaks to how dedicated he is to the project. But we see a wide range of kind of what people are putting into it. I would say too few entrepreneurs are putting some of their personal stakes up. A lot of people starting companies have a great fall back plan, a lot of these are very talented people, then go get six-figure jobs in Silicon Valley fairly easily. So a lot of time they don’t put enough on the line because of the fall back it’s still great. So as an entrepreneur, it’s really easy to give up when the worst-case scenarios are not that bad. So I like having someone put more on the line.